Pizza Night Algarve (Fridayhappiness Associação) — Restaurant in Monchique

This review is for volunteering/workaway at the Pizza Night place. I stayed 6 days and while I did have enjoyable times and have my basic needs (mostly) covered, I am still left in shock at how this business operates. I write this as a warning to people coming to this place as it is falsely advertised (permaculture farm working toward self sustainable). They call it a community or a workaway. In reality it's a for-profit business model by taking advantage of and mistreating volunteers.

The work: They say it's 25hr/week, but this does not include 1-3 meetings per day, and extra shifts during the Weds burger night party and Friday pizza party. In reality the time exchange is closer to 40 hours. They are tricky in the way they make people feel guilty for speaking up about the extra hours.

The food: Volunteers are served bread for breakfast and dry cereal without milk, plus some chopped apple. For lunch it is pasta with plain red sauce, the side salad was the same for lunch and dinner all days I was there. While I was there many volunteers got sick and we asked for some vegetables for the meals and were screamed at for asking.

The accommodations: If you have a tent you are in a small area they call the "covid area" with your tent a meter from the next tent. Others are housed in old caravans with missing windows or trashed. Cold showers.

Mistreatment: In my 6 days we ran out of drinking water twice for 6 hours each. Management did not feel that volunteers working in the hot sun needing water was priority and were shamed for asking for water. We were out of toilet paper approx half of the time. Morning meetings began before sun up and were often quite dark and harsh in their tone. For the Friday pizza party, it was needed to have a few volunteers work 10 hours in order to keep bars open later for more profits. Instead of offering a nice incentive they just made people feel guilty until a few passive people volunteered for extra working.

Also, on the Friday morning we had a volunteer test positive for covid. He then isolated but the party went on as normal. This felt not great for the surrounding community.

Looking back I do find it quite hilarious that this business model actually works for 8 years going. I don't feel traumatized but...

Unfortunately I had a very bad experience as a volunteer January 2023. I only stayed for 12 hours and for one night, because I was not feeling safe at all at a place that advertises happiness. I heard from various people that this place was once very nice, before covid and the fires. That people were full of energy to build something beautiful and a community - that they shared a common purpose, to make the world a better place.

When I arrived, I didn't feel any of this energy, especially not the feeling of community. I arrived on Monday and I was told that all people are still tired and exhausted from the party on Friday. The energy was low, the people exhausted and I felt like all my positive energy was sucked out of my body, because the people there needed it so badly. I wasn't really welcomed by the owner, he didn't speak to me. I was just treated as a problem that needs a bed to sleep. No one felt responsible for me, so I tried to stick to the people who wanted to help me and with whom I felt some kind of connection. I'm glad I met some people who were there for me, because I really struggled.

The night was terribly cold and I slept in a clay house without heating with two other volunteers. My body was shaking till the next morning and I catched a cold over night. The animals were all sick and people were having arguments a lot - emotions weren't regulated at this place. For a very sensitive and intuitive person like me, this place was very disruptive to my nervous system.

I wasn't really told what to do, the communication about the tasks was bad and the volunteers usually planned the day themselves - the owners basically didn't contribute anything to the daily meetings. Also most of the people came too late to the morning meeting, which is a sign of disrespect for me.

After my experience in the morning, I spoke to some volunteers and shared with them my feelings about the place and that I wanted to leave. After talking to them, I felt better and eventually I found a like-minded soul and we left the place (after 12 hours) together. I have never felt so unsafe in a place and would not recommend ever volunteering there. I will also not come...

Volunteers, run away from this place !

This place is supposed to be an ecological and artistic community striving towards self-sufficiency, but it's absolutely false: it's more like a company exploiting young volunteers to stage huge rave parties every Friday night. The workaway contract is totally disregarded: no accommodation is provided, and they personally told us to pitch our tent on a bramble patch! The food provided is catastrophic: in the morning we were given stale bread balls and poor apple slices, attacked by flies, and for lunch and dinner we had to prepare a meal based on rice or pasta and a filthy tomato sauce, and if we asked, we were entitled to a few meagre vegetables from the "vegetable garden".

THE MOST UNACCEPTABLE THING WAS THE KITCHEN: a container in the middle of a dusty parking lot, covered in soot, with no running water! EVERYTHING WAS DIRTY AND IN A DEPLORABLE STATE. The permanent staff didn't even eat with the volunteers, as they regularly fell ill because of it!!!!

Finally, the HOURS WERE ANORMAL, BECAUSE WE WERE NOT ACCOMMODATED AND WE WERE POORLY NOURISHED: over 40 HOURS / WEEK, with no breaks during pizza evenings. Despite the friendliness of the permanent staff, there was a lack of organization that prevented us from engaging in a work dynamic, no one was capable of dealing with conflicts or managing, because they were high all the time.

Run away from this place and go to a more caring and...